Charlotte Schools

State lawmakers still can’t come to an agreement over how large of a pay raise they want to give public school teachers.

House leaders want to give teachers an average six percent raise, while Senate leaders want to give them about 11 percent. But the Senate plan would cut more than 6,000 teacher assistant jobs to help pay for that larger salary boost.

It’s a concession that many school leaders say they can’t get behind. They want raises, but not by laying off thousands of teacher assistants.

A comprehensive testing program launched last year in the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Schools has been abruptly shut down. Dave DeWitt reports that the tests drew a high number of parent complaints.

Dave DeWitt: 52 year-end tests were developed during the administration of superintendent Peter Gorman, for students as young as kindergarten. The idea was to gather more data on students -and then determine a baseline for future academic performance. Teachers would then be rewarded - or punished - if that student performed better or worse than expected.